After a short fight, excited voices called out from the other side, and before we understood what was happening, the first British soldiers came out towards us with their hands above their heads. One after another, they rounded the traverse and unbuckled, while our guns and pistols remained levelled at them. They were young, good-looking fellows in new uniforms. I let them go by me, and said ‘Hands down!’ and summoned a platoon to lead them away. Most of them showed us by their confident smiles that they didn’t expect us to do anything too terrible to them. Others tried to propitiate us by holding out cigarette packets and bars of chocolate. With the waxing joy of the huntsman, I saw we had made a huge catch; the line seemed unending. We had counted past a hundred and fifty, and more were still coming out. I stopped an officer and asked him about the rest of the position, and its defence. He replied very politely; he really didn’t need to stand to attention. He took me to the company commander, a wounded captain, who was in a nearby foxhole. I saw myself face to face with a young man of about twenty-six, with fine features, leaning against the shelter door with a bullet through his calf. When I introduced myself to him, he lifted his hand to his cap, I caught a flash of gold at the wrist, he said his name, and handed over his pistol. His opening words showed me he was a real man. ‘We were surrounded.’ He felt obliged to explain to his opponent why his company had surrendered so quickly. We talked about various matters in French. He told me there were quite a few German wounded, whom his men had bandaged and fed, in a nearby shelter. When I asked him how strong the rearward defences of the line were, he would give me no information. After I had promised to have him and the other wounded men sent back, we parted with a shake of the hand.
Outside the dugout, I ran into Hoppenrath, who told me we’d taken about two hundred prisoners. For a company that was eighty strong, that wasn’t bad going. After I’d posted sentries, we took a look around at the captured trench, which was bristling with weapons and all manner of equipment. In the fire-bays lay machine-guns, mortars, hand- and rifle-grenades, water-bottles, sheepskin jerkins, waterproofs, tarpaulins, tins of meat, jam, tea, coffee, cocoa and tobacco, bottles of cognac, tools, pistols, flare pistols, undergarments, gloves; in short, pretty much anything you could think of. Like an old feudal commander, I allowed a few minutes for taking plunder, to give the men a chance to draw breath, and to take a look at some of the items. I, for my part, was unable to resist ordering up a little breakfast for myself in a dugout entrance and filling my pipe with some fine Navy Cut tobacco while I scribbled out my report to the commanding officer of the troops in the line. Painstaking man that I am, I also sent a copy to our battalion commander.
Half an hour later, we set off again in euphoric mood – perhaps the British cognac might have contributed a little – and made our way forward along the Siegfried Line, dodging from traverse to traverse.
We were fired on from a pillbox built into the trench, and we therefore climbed out on to the nearest fire-step to have a look around. Whilst we were trading bullets with the occupants, one man was knocked flat as if by an invisible fist. A bullet had drilled through the top of his helmet, and ploughed a furrow along the top of his skull. I could see the brain rise and fall in the wound with every heartbeat, and yet he was capable of going back on his own. I had to remind him to leave his knapsack behind, he had been going to take it, and I implored him to take his time and be careful.
I asked for some volunteers to break the resistance by an attack across the open field. The men eyed each other doubtfully; only an awkward Pole, whom I had always taken for a cretin, climbed out of the trench, and trudged off towards the pillbox. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the name of this simple man, who taught me that you can’t say you really know a man if you haven’t seen him under conditions of danger. Then Ensign Neupert and his section leaped out of the line, while we continued along the trench at the same time. The British fired off a few shots and fled, leaving the pillbox for us. One of our attackers had collapsed in mid-charge, and was lying on the ground a few steps away from it. He had received one of those shots to the heart that lay a man out as if he were asleep.
As we proceeded, we encountered some stiff resistance from some hand-grenade throwers we couldn’t see, and gradually found ourselves pushed back to the pillbox. There we locked ourselves up. In the contested line of trench, both sides sustained losses. Unfortunately, one of ours happened to be NCO Mevius, whom I had discovered to be a bold fighter on the night of Regnieville. He was lying face down in a puddle of blood. When I turned him over, I saw by a large hole in his forehead that it was too late for any help. I had just exchanged a few words with him; suddenly a question I’d asked went unanswered. A few seconds later, when I looked round the traverse to see what was keeping him, he was already dead. It was an eerie feeling.
After our opponents had also pulled back a little, a protracted exchange of fire ensued, with a Lewis gun barely fifty yards away from us forcing us to keep our heads down. We responded with one of our own light machine-guns. For maybe half a minute, the two guns fought it out, with the bullets spraying and bouncing everywhere. Then our gunner, Lance-Corporal Motullo, collapsed with a shot in the head. Even though his brains were dribbling down past his chin, he was still lucid as we carried him into the nearest shelter. Motullo was an older man, one of those who would never have volunteered; but once he was standing behind his machine-gun, I had occasion to observe that, even though he was standing in a hail of bullets, he didn’t duck his head by so much as an inch. When I asked him how he was feeling, he was capable of replying in complete sentences. I had the sense that his mortal wound didn’t hurt him at all, maybe that he wasn’t even aware of it.
Gradually, things calmed down a little, as the British for their part were also busy digging themselves in. At twelve o’clock, Captain von Brixen, Lieutenant Tebbe and Lieutenant Voigt came by; they offered their congratulations on the company’s successes. We sat down in the pillbox, lunched off British provisions, and discussed the position. In between times, I was having to negotiate with about two dozen Britishers, whose heads appeared out of the trench a hundred yards away, and who seemed to want to surrender. But as soon as I put my own head over the parapet, I found myself under fire from somewhere further back.
Suddenly, there was some commotion at the British barricade. Hand-grenades flew, rifles banged, machine-guns clattered. ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’ We leaped behind sandbags and started shooting. In the heat of battle, one of my men, Corporal Kimpenhaus, jumped up on to the parapet, and fired down into the trench until he was brought down by two bad wounds in his arms. I took a note of this hero of the hour, and was proud to be able to congratulate him two weeks later, on the award of the Iron Cross, First Class.